We talked about it before here, but now there is only about 2 days left and even though all funds go to the team regardless of if the goal is reached, they are still a long way off what then would need to create a nice set of openly licensed fantasy monsters.
So please head over to their indiegogo fund-raiser page: "Free the Monsters" and donate.
Just a quick note. I'm looking to fund work on OpenGameArt.org full time (probably via Kickstarter or similar) once my current work project is done, and I'm interested in hearing what people would like me to work on. If you have any thoughts, please join the discussion on OGA:
Squamulus in the forums has pointed us to the DigitalMan Open Source Game Competition, a competition for complete-ish open source games, wherein the winners get ported to their new all-encompassing content delivery/creation system WorldKi
Nominations started a week or so ago and so far they have 41 open source games nominated, which is quite a decent list in my opinion, you can view the full list here. Unfortunately, nominations close today (12pm CST) so this post might be a bit late if you want to nominate your own games..
Voting begins as soon as nominations close, so check back at their page if you want to be heard.
My thoughts on the competition:
It's definitely interesting to see another entry into the sparsely populated Open Source( Gluon[alpha], OpenCDS[dead], and to a lesser degree DJL[also dead]) /densely populated Proprietary (Steam, Desura, Impulse etc etc) game content delivery arena.
There's not a whole lot of info on WorldKi, it seems a very ambitious project that combines game distribution with game development, with monetization all along the way (eg. Middleware devs can sell their libraries, Artists their art, and finally devs their games). If FOSS game devs can pay the bills from foss games alone, we might see some real growth..
As for handing out porting as a prize? I'm not totally sure if that's the way to go about doing things, especially if no one has heard of the platform before. Mentioning the possible monetization through the platform might have made it a bit more appealing, but then again, such things also cause dispute.
OpenGameArt Weekly Competition
On another note, the OpenGameArt Friday Challenge got renamed to "Weekly Challenge" and still starts on Fridays but ends after ten days (Mondays) so on during the weekend there are two topics to contribute to. :) The challenge art submission count is now at 77 (17 new + 60 old).
The current theme is Public Treasure Hunt and involves scouting the web for public domain game resources and is due June 28th.
You might remember this video-heavy post about Dragon History, a comical fantasy adventure game for ScummVM. I wanted to inform you that the game art, including music, graphics and text are all covered by the GPLv2. They can be downloaded here.
The game is originally written in Czech and properly translated to the Polish language. If you have the necessary language skills and want to make the game accessible to a wider audience, it would be great if you could work on cleaning up the English translation. The contact information of the maintainer is on his homepage. If you want to turn this into a team project, feel free to use FreeGameDev's general forum for a thread.
Speaking of free assets: The current OpenGameArt friday challenge is "Near Future" and I have no idea what to.. hm.. cyberpunk?
To the six finished challenges, 50 pieces of game art have been submitted. It's quite fun to follow new art and picking the best pieces, so don't let the submission forms discourage you from joining in. ;)
Oh, and speaking of cyberpunk, the quite awesome soundtrack to the hacker game Endgame: Singularity has been uploaded in .ogg and source form to OGA. And the minimal-graphics single-player HTML5 turn-based strategy game Evil Cult has a great feel to it when you play it while listening to that (kind of) music.
PS: Silly me forgot to include my source of information for the art licensing of Dragon History. It's email communication with the project maintainer. :)
What you see here are the 2D/3D submission to the first three OpenGameArt 5-day game art challenges, which were initiated by pfunked, author of OSARE and active OGA artist.
Check out the general rules and the current challenge rules in its thread in this forum. You don't even need to register to participate, just remember to include your author information and the correct tags ("Friday Challenge" and "ChallengeTitle", separate via ",") to your submission!
The challenges/competitions last from Monday till Friday, so there are still a bunch of hours left to submit something to the current "Homage" challenge. :) This feed will keep you updated about new challenges.
The following is a preview of the four pieces of music submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)
And here are the sound effects submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)
By the way, Blendswap apparently will implement license selection soon. Since I mentioned my preference for their poll, "licenses" has been leading with ~30 votes. Thanks! This means that, depending on what licenses will be selectable, models on Blendswap will be usable by foss games.
The TORCS fork racing sim Speed Dreams (new website) seeks dev/art help for finishing the 2.0 release. The impression I get from taking a look at their commit history is that the project seems to be developing at a steady pace.
I discovered Pac Defence recently. I love this genre, but prefer the non-abstract implementations (PacDef is abstract) and the kind where you can use your towers to build mazes (in PacDef you build along the path). Here's a gameplay video for you. If you know of any foss maze/non-abstract TD games, please let me know! :)
I saw a video of FlightGear's urban effect and it looks awesome! If you enjoy these kind of videos, I can only recommend subscribing to planetacancun2 (author of the video) via YouTube profile or feed.
Violetland was tweaked a little, it has improved GUI and new pick-ups: bombs, bullet boosts, some pills which I don't know the effect of and the player has a teleport ability.
SuperTux 3D is a 2½ years old idea that is now being turned into reality by using the 2D platformer SuperTux' style and assets and the Blender Game Engine (BGE). I think the assets work well in 3D space, but of course controls and camera movement are unpleasant yet.
Xdriller is a falling-cubes-style puzzle game with nice colorful visuals and happy music. I found the game on SF.net a while ago and recently got reminded of it when I saw this tux model on OG.
Speaking of Blender and asset sharing: Blendswap currently has a poll on what website feature to add next (right sidebar here) and I would like to encourage you all to vote for the 'licensing' option, as once clear licenses exist, it will be possible to determine what models can be used in fully free as in you-know-what games.
Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^
LinWarrior3D2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have a wingman.
On the other hand, there is no mission goal and the game lacks any mech customization. Also I really miss a "STOMP STOMP" sound.. As for the game's name: well, at least they don't call it "FreeMech". :)
There's quite a bunch of new content in Sauerbraten's subversion repository, taken from Quadropolis, their community content sharing web site. However, [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here].
I am quite surprised how much new content Quadropolis is attracting. On the other hand a discussion was started on OpenGameArt's forums, discussing the additional hardships of creating free as in freedom art, which kind of explains it. On the other, other hand, OpenGameArt is doing not bad as well, it attracts contributors who would probably never find a fitting project for their art and keep their works on their hard drive until the next disk failure should have separated them. I wish that projects would start telling their contributors to upload their works straight to OGA though.
I also hope that the community content sites set up for SuperTuxKart, VDrift and WorldForge will help contributors as they are supposed to.
